[Suggestion] : make any planet/moon smashable to any other celestial body including the sun

Isn't that basically the game anyway?

.....what?

so PA is a game that indulges in moderation now? what if I have butttons of ca$h compared to my opponent and I wanna prove it to him by moving my planet into orbit range of his asteroid and rain nukes on him?

Because of limitations of how universes work. Big planets can't orbit smaller planets. It wouldn't make sense to enable that.

PA doesn't "indulge in moderation" – it just doesn't enable absurdity.

And don't throw the whole "PA isn't about realism" line at me. Because PA does deal in some way in the realm of realism. Basic things must stay anchored in the realm of reality for PA to be a believable thing.

There's just a crap ton of extra work involved in making sure that every planet in the system is moveable. It isn't worth Uber's time right now.

Maybe eventually... I guess. Make it moveable. But there are a TON of variables in making every orbital body moveable – which means a ton of work.

And there's no point in Uber wasting time in developing a feature that enables players to make such ridiculously poor choices in game. When we're dealing with a size 1,000 planet... there is no way whatsoever that building enough Halleys to move it is a smart tactical decision. The only reason to move it would be "because I can" – which is not a good enough reason for Uber's time right now.

wow that was predictable. I didn't provide the pary to this in the previous comment because that would have seemed like I'm implying that you would say something like that, but now you have.

Are you saying, the Uber devs would knowingly carry through with such odd behavior?

what if they just had whatever planet has more mass be the orbited and the one with the least the satellite, as is already the case in the system editor?

what if eh? hard to believe but I'm willing to take a wager that this would change the orbit pattern of the planets or asteroid it moves next to.

(smylies for backup cuddles : )

What if?

Well. How about all of the other reasons I mentioned.

Incorporating what you are suggesting would take a ton of development because it introduces a ton of different situations which would have a ton of bugs. Taking care of all of those bugs would require a lot of time, which would be expensive, for something that is not needed to be in game.

When someone gives multiple reasons "why not" – don't respond to just one of the reasons.

that isn't for you to judge.

I really think the devs ought to put it to debate.

I'd find it scary that this be considered "unneeded" now when in the kickstarter vid, the impression was given that it would be the case. "planets smashing into one another" at 3:20 is one such statement. but that's the way i understood Neutrino's take through his comments throughout the forum.

I really hope this is still the plan, it would be really really sad not to be able to move planets in PA. who ever said you could never build enough hailleys? never say never.

Way to continue to ignore many of my major points.

I'm guessing the devs already did put it to debate since they have stated that not all planets will be moveable.

No the hard mechanics are already in the game. It would only require small to trivivial amount of work. The question is more of game design policy.

I can find edge cases where it would be feasible. Given that you can reland to annihilated planets you might run out of smashable moons. Then you have to have silly planet sieges or have ground grinding. Either can develop into a stable meat grinder. And the metal losses on those can reach huge numbers. Being able to divert some of that into halleys would atleast eventually give the one with more planets a way to force the game in their favour. In that ridicilous scale you are already covering whole big planets into anti-nuke, umbrella and power generator mats. The transition to Halleys would say that you can hold the planet with lesser density of traditional defences and the mass difference wouldn't be that much.

Moving huge planets would come later in the games pacing than every other known method of waging war. Enabling things that work only there doesn't provide incentives to morph the already known previous stages. The question is that how big games does Uber Enterainment want to support? This might be more relevant for how the game ages. It might be fine to draw the line that stellar scale is out that only intra- and interplanetary gameplay will be supported. But the option to have a bigger scale wouldn't be that much out of reach.

This is true for objects in rest but an accelerating observer can go around a object in a much smaller radius than it could orbit it. Althoguth it is a rather poor use of usually limited delta-v but it's not like the Halleys are doing anything when not firing and fuel isn't an issue for them (meaning kinda maybe within Hollywoode physics).

I think people are talking about different things here : strategies and possibilities.

It might not be a good strategy to throw a planet in the sun (and again it depends on the situation), but it is still a possibility.
So my suggestion was not about finding new and better strategy but just about having a new possibility which, according to me, adds fun and also isn't really absurd.

Then, going back to the fact that you could move any planet, it just sounded "logic" to me that if you can move one planet then you can move any planet.
Certainly there are some cases which are not trivial (orbiting planets), but as soon as you can modify the position of a single planet by using those Uber engines (halleys), it makes sense to me that you can move any celestial body on which you can build those.

And finally that's how I came with the idea of smashing planet into the sun, because once you have only 1 planet left, you can still move it, and the only left target is ... the sun.

But again, this is just a suggestion, not a request for new feature

As some already said, modding the game when it will be available might be the way to implement such a suggestion.

More like trying to destroy an egg with a house. You are not throwing the egg to destroy the house... I see it as a great way to say "F*** you! If I can't have this planet, nobody can!" lol. I love it! There should be an experimental engine that can move any body + halleys for smaller 1s

I did some test with the system editor and yes you can make all the planet movable, even with just 1 halley on the biggest planet if you want.

So that means that this feature is already available somehow. And not additional coding is necessary to put it in place.

I am pretty satisfied with the fact that I can create a system which has all its planets movable.

Now, just need the possibility to smash them all into the sun

Well after doing a real test by playing the system I just made, it turned out that I was not able to move the big planet that I just set to require 1 engine to move.

So it seems that there are some rules to really have a planet move, not just the number of engines you choose is the system editor, unless I missed something ?

It used to be based on the planets size, so it's possible that you still need the minimum that the planet needs, if the engines are turned on at all.

Im certainly no developer, but given that:
a) Halleys can be built on any planet, although they won't neccesarily work.
b) The ability to change the orbit of small halleyed objects will likely be added soon, as it is already in the game gui
c) In the system editor, planets can be moved in realtime and will snap into orbit of others with larger mass, and can then have their orbit paths simulated with the click of a button.

It does not seem like it would be overly complicated to move a large planet with halleys to a new location, then have the nearby smaller objects snap into its orbit, and furthermore to allow a large planet to be smashed into a smaller one and do a simple greater than/less than check on their size so the smaller one is destroyed. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong and the engine has limitations or it would be far more difficult to add, but this feature would definatley help with stalemates where one player has a clearly larger planet and far more resources, but no feasible way to launch an invasion or nuke barrage the other. I apologize ahead of time to the (truly amazing) developers on the off chance that this is not possible to implement or would take significant time away from other more important features.

It's also already in the game. not pretty or very usable at all but it certainly functions.

just click on the bullseye as you would then zoom back in you'll see the planet is moving and arrives in the other orbit.

lol Balance does not only have to do with units or buildings or strategies in the game and how efficient they are. Balance has many view from different peoples perspectives .

Did you make sure that the engine setting actually applied? I had problems getting the engine count (and other settings in the same window for that matter) to save if I just clicked outside of the window to make it go away, but it saved properly if I closed the window via the "close" button.